Winner of Microsoft Australia’s Imagine Cup a sight not to be seen

The winners of Microsoft Australia's recent Imagine Cup have created a version …

Programming competitions seem to always churn out one or two projects that are worth a second look. For example, Daniel Egnor won Google's 2002 programming contest by writing software that allowed users to search for web pages in a specific geographic locale. Don Demsak, the inventor of the Visual Studio plug-in known as XPathmania, won Microsoft's Visual Studio Extensibility Contest with his terrific add-on that allows for XPath testing within the development environment. Plenty of other examples exist as well, but none may be as life-changing as the recent winner of Microsoft Australia's Imagine Cup contest.

A platoon from the University of Canberra, Team Audio Programming Assistant (APA), used the Visual Studio SDK to customize Visual Studio 2005 so that it could be used by the blind. APA demonstrated the software by completely covering a laptop screen and trading verbal commands with it in order to write code. Besides creating code through audio, Visual Studio's IntelliSense was also modified to work with spoken language. If there were any downside to the project, it was that the environment would only work with the C# programming language.

As if the accessibility enhancements to Visual Studio were not enough, APA also modified Internet Explorer so that links and input fields on a page could be read aloud to the blind. To complement that creation, the team designed a web site specifically for blind developers. The site consisted of tips, tricks, and tutorials for teaching the blind how to write code.

Although the judges debated whether APA's target market was too narrow, in the end it was decided that the group would be crowned the winner. The judging panel felt that APA's creation was not just innovative, but it had the possibility to help real-world people. By winning the Australian Imagine Cup contest, APA will now move to the Imagine Cup finals in Korea.